I watched "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" yesterday, and it was much shorter than I remember! Still fabulous, though. I totally love his dog, Max (see icon).

I talked to our vet's office yesterday about our planned trip to Hawaii to visit the in-laws in a couple months, and asked if they knew of any cat sitters who could/would do the daily injection of subcutaneous fluids Cobweb needs (which I think are what has been keeping her alive the past several months). Our usual cat sitter -- a casual friend of mine, who is a good friend of a good friend -- is wonderful, but I wouldn't really feel comfortable asking her to stick a needle in our extremely uncooperative cat every day.

It turns out that one of our vet's office's vet techs does pet sitting on the side, and she charges a relatively small fee ($40/day) for two visits a day, and she will handle all the usual cat sitting stuff (food, litter boxes, playing) along with giving Cobweb her pills and her sub-q fluids. What a relief to know that someone knowledgeable and experienced (and fond enough of animals to devote her career to them!) will be watching out for our sick kitty while we're gone! We can't know, of course, what Cobweb's state of health will be by then (though it's certainly unlikely to be better), as her downturns in the past have been sudden and swift, but she's doing okay right now, so I'm hoping she'll be in a similar state a couple months from now, in which case we will need this kind of help. And if she has some kind of downturn while we're gone, who better to be watching her than a vet tech? Shannon and I are both heaving sighs of relief at the lifting of the worry.

My left wrist has been much worse today, gosh darn it! I must have slept on it funny, because I noticed around 7 a.m. that it was extremely uncomfortable, and that has continued all day today. Ice packs are your friend. I ditched CWC in order to stay home and do my PT exercises and apply ice packs often often often.

Shannon and I have been playing a new-to-me game called Ascension, a deck-building card game that is in some ways a bit similar to Dominion. The similarities are significant enough that I've been having a bit of trouble shifting my strategies, because I'm so used to how I try to win Dominion ... and those methods don't work all that well with this game. It's really fun, though, so Shannon and I have played a couple games of it this week. He's kicked my butt both times, but I still had a great time. It's nice to discover another game I really like.

We've made plans to spend Christmas with Shannon's mom's side of the family, which will apparently involve hanging out with more than 20 people for a few hours. It'll be nice to see everyone, as they're all people I've met before and liked, but I imagine I'll be wanting to hide somewhere very isolated by the time we're done.